Television

Dark deeds have never looked brighter

With the possible exception of underfunding, the most commonly cited enemy of British film is poor light. Because you can't make vital art when the sky resembles an unwashed duvet. And no actor can radiate on screen when our streets are bathed in a dull industrial glow. One of the many reasons to savour Low Winter Sun is that it took these gloomy wisdoms and turned them into blinding virtues.

Set in an Edinburgh in which sunlight was little more than a rumour, it was like a film noir written by Dostoevsky in the language of James Kelman. It opened with two police detectives (Mark Strong and Brian McCardie) arranging to kill their corrupt and violent colleague. Strong's character, Frank, had to drink himself into a state, as his colleague put it, where he was morally inured to what he was about to do but still physically capable of doing it. 'I won't get too drunk,' promised Frank, between swigs on a bottle. 'But I'm not drunk enough yet.'

Much of Simon Donald's bristling dialogue negotiated the same precipitous line between black humour and dark psychology, but a first-rate cast never sought the safety of laughs or melodrama. I doubt that there is an actor working in Britain who does taut and intense better than Strong. What made his performance, however, is not so much the penetrating power of that x-ray stare, hauntingly familiar from The Long Firm, as the flashes of vulnerability that lay behind it.

No less complex was McCardie's delightfully crumpled Joe, a former seminary boy awash with blood and guilt. Together the pair took the old good-cop, bad-cop routine and, as they investigated the murder they had committed, reworked it into a compellingly twisted study of trust. As Frank quipped to Joe at one stage: 'So arrest me. Or if you like, I'll arrest you.'

A splendid, if bleak and brutal, piece of stylised realism, Low Winter Sun also boasted some classic morgue scenes (including a nice turn from John Sessions as a brusque pathologist), an ear for the conversational use of expletives, and the kind of smoking that's not been seen since it was banned on the top deck of buses.

Best of all it took its Chandleresque material - a missing woman, a headless corpse, a mysterious Chinese connection - and suffused it in the cold blue half-light of a Scots hangover. So vivid you almost needed to close your eyes.

Come the eve of the anniversary, viewers could have been forgiven for suffering 9/11 fatigue. No doubt some would rather have sat through a box-set of The Vicar of Dibley than watch a four hours-and-40-minutes drama on The Path to 9/11. But actually it did the best, or at least the most comprehensive, job so far in joining together the multitude of dots that led from the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to the attacks in 2001. The American-made two-parter came in from criticism from Bill Clinton, who demanded and apparently got changes, but his administration was still portrayed as ineffectual, politically correct and distracted by the president's sex scandal involving Monica Lewinsky. Subsequently the film's director has been exposed as a member of a religious right group.

Still, as the old defence goes, it was a drama not a documentary, and as a drama it did its job. Essentially it took the 9/11 Commission report, itself an absorbing read, and hung it on the larger-than-life character of John O'Neill, the former chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section. O'Neill's incredible real-life arc is that he tried and failed to have Osama bin Laden killed and, disillusioned with the agency, left to become head of security at the WTC just weeks before he was to perish therein. O'Neill was something of a hard-nosed dandy in reality, and Harvey Keitel, all dapper suits and kick-ass attitude, played those qualities to the hilt. It was as if his Wolf from Pulp Fiction had graduated from cleaning up crime scenes to cleaning up the world.

Regardless of their accuracy, many of the scenes featuring inter-agency disputes and government backtracking seemed all too authentic. Where the film faltered was in its depiction of the

al-Qaeda and Afghan training camps.

It's not that the Islamist characterisations were unflattering. Ayman al-Zawahiri, for example, seemed positively benign when set against the ranting zealot we know from newsreel footage. But they were all a bit walk-on wooden Arabs, who looked as if they'd been released from another mini-series rather than Egyptian jails.

Also, I'm not sure it was a wise move to cast Penny Johnson Jerald as Condoleezza Rice, the same actress who played a White House Lady Macbeth in 24. At the very least it caused a certain narrative contamination, so that you wondered why Jack Bauer didn't simply apply some electrodes to Ramzi Yousef's scrotum and be done with it.

Where the film was strongest was in laying out the clear, indeed familial, links between the 1993 plotters and the 'planes operation' eight years later. Yousef, the engineer of the first bombing, was a product of one of bin Laden's Afghan training camps. He was also the nephew of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11.

There seems to be an idea gaining currency that jihadist suicide bombers are simply exasperated Iraq war protesters let down by the limitations of democratic debate. Whatever its dubious provenance, The Path to 9/11 reminded us that the mass killers are in fact determined and organised, and their hatred long-standing. Its message in the end was that the 2001 plot succeeded because the American authorities thought that 1993 was an aberration. Let's hope, post-7/7, the British authorities never make the same mistake.

It can now be confirmed that Ricky Gervais shares something in common with Woody Allen other than their rare combination of verbal and slapstick comedic gifts. And it's not a stepdaughter thing, either. For some years, it's been noticeable that big-name actors in Allen's films seem compelled to do impressions of the great man, employing his unique tics and hesitations. In the first episode of the second series of Extras we saw Orlando Bloom effectively mimicking David Brent. Even the excellent Ashley Jensen, who plays Maggie, let slip a few facial gestures on which Gervais surely retains the copyright. You can understand the temptation - the lines seem to call for Gervais's delivery - but it's one that should be resisted. All you can think of is how much more amusing it would be if Gervais himself were doing it.

Continuing the self-referential theme, Andy Millman (Gervais) is now writing and starring in his own sitcom. The joke is that instead of maintaining his artistic credibility, like Gervais, he folds to pressure to produce the kind of laughless comedies in which the BBC specialised before The Office. 'I want four-year-olds to enjoy this,' said a defeated Millman.

There were some acid observations on the corporate tendency towards the obvious - curly wigs and catchphrases are deemed funny - but their effect was diluted by the flamboyant campness of the TV executives imposing these comedy rules. Gervais appeared to be guilty of what he was satirising. If it was intentional, then the result has to be filed under 'clever' rather than 'funny'.

That said, there was one very funny moment - Gervais in curly wig shouting a catchphrase. The catchphrase was: 'Are you having a laugh?' At that point, at least, the answer was a resounding yes.

In turning the camera back on itself, Extras, which is co-produced by HBO, is following a fine American tradition. Hollywood likes nothing better than sending up Hollywood and, with films like The Player and Get Shorty, it does the job well. But the benchmark for self-parody remains The Larry Sanders Show.

Entourage is a new series, also produced by HBO, that follows a pretty-boy film star and his gang of hangers-on. It's not quite in the Larry Sanders league, but it's slick, sharp and easy on the eye. The eponymous entourage drift through La-la land from premiere to pool-side party, buying anything - a $320,000 Rolls, say - that will hold their shortened attention for a few hours. But what they mostly do is chase models in bikinis.

Jeremy Piven stands out as the shark-like agent, snapping at the main chance. 'I gotta know what you think,' he flatters one of the gang, 'so I can get you to think what I think.' The executive producer is Mark Wahlberg, famed for his own wrecking crew, so we can assume that it's not a long way from real life, Hollywood-style. Which is to say, vacuous, mindless and utterly appealing.

Perhaps that's the key difference between British and American humour. In Extras the invitation to laugh comes from despair, in Entourage it comes with a red carpet and canapes. One is the embarrassment of too little, the other the shame of too much.

The Wright choice

When someone arrives on television with an excess of personality, they present a problem. What do you do with them? Give them a game show? Give them a chat show? That's certainly how the BBC seemed to handle the case of Ian Wright.

The ex-Gunner was just the kind of loose cannon that excites and terrifies commissioning editors in equal measure. But it's one thing being asked your opinion of Sven-Goran Eriksson, another asking other people questions that don't involve football. Friday Night's All Wright and Wright Here, Wright Now were very expensive ways of proving what we already knew: that Wright was an entertaining football pundit.

But Channel 4 has a good track record for finding celebrity niches. It turned Jamie Oliver from an overexposed irritation into a national hero with Jamie's Kitchen and it may well do the same trick with Ian Wright's Unfit Kids. Wright is impassioned, frustrated and concerned, but it is far from clear that he knows what he's doing. And that makes for some great human drama. He shoots and, at last, he scores.

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